Spooks
by JustSaraNoH
Summary: The junior agents, on the other hand, swore that if you said that name too many times, the fallen senior agent would rise from the dead and haunt you like some sort of Beetlejuice curse. Score one for the junior agents.


**NOTES:** This was written for a challenge on Tumblr regarding the upcoming SHIELD television show. Since that is not yet a category on here, I'm putting this under The Avengers.

Thanks to **the_wordbutler** for the beta.

* * *

Agent Leo Fitz did his best not too look startled when Agent Blake seemingly appeared out of thin air. He failed. The salt-and-pepper haired man was standing on the other side of Fitz's lab bench, the usual look of _You're not worth my time, but here I am stuck talking to you anyway_ in his ice blue eyes. The first words out of the senior agent's mouth were, "Let's go."

"Go where?"

Blake tilted his head in a silent judgment of Leo's intelligence. "Somewhere not here."

Fitz looked down at his bench. He was about to run the latest round of tests on a radioactive tracking device he was developing. He needed to perform his experiment in the next thirty minutes or the small amount of isotopes he'd been testing over the last few days would finally decay into something unusable. It would take a week for him to replenish his supplies. He lifted his head. "Can you give me an hour?"

"What do you think?"

"Fine," he sighed. Senior agents were the worst, especially Blake. They all thought the safety of the universe rested on their shoulders, and heaven forbid if you thought you knew something they didn't. Or if you couldn't take their coffee order correctly. That one was probably a worse idea than trying to show them the error of their ways.

Fitz made a mental note to send a message to Agent Simmons, his bestie without testes and fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. geek, to pull her magic in getting him a new batch of isotopes. He then began to edit his report in his head to discuss the delay in the next round of his experimentation. Fitz was so lost in deciding how best to word _This would've been done by now if Agent Blake would've let me finish my work instead of thinking himself as the point the Earth revolves around_ that he failed to notice he was walking down a corridor he'd never seen before.

It wasn't until the two men stopped outside an office door that Fitz's brain kicked him back in the present. He should've been paying attention the whole time, should've recognized that there weren't too many people in the organization who could turn Agent Blake into a gopher. Fitz's heart began to race as his mind started to list the very few people who it could be: Director Fury and Assistant Director Hill for sure, as well as a few others. But whatever rapid beat his heart was making threatened to stop and freeze altogether when his eyes fell on the nameplate to the right of the office door.

_Agent P. Coulson_

Even though nearly a year had elapsed since the Battle of New York, there were some topics of discussion about that fateful day that were still off-limits. That name was one of them. You never even whispered it around a senior agent unless you wanted them to burn a hole through your body with a death glare. The junior agents, on the other hand, swore that if you said that name too many times, the fallen senior agent would rise from the dead and haunt you like some sort of Beetlejuice curse.

Agent Blake extended his hand in front of the door sensor beneath the nameplate to notify whoever was inside of their presence, and a second later, the door opened. The older man gestured for Fitz to enter with a smirk. Had he been anything other than pants-pissingly terrified about whomever the office's occupant was, Fitz would've mentally snarked about how Blake was now responsible for chasing down and chauffeuring baby agents around headquarters. But no, Fitz's mind wasn't capable of forming those kinds of thoughts right now—because as he slowly walked into the office to see the man sitting behind the desk, something in Fitz's brain broke.

Score one for the junior agents.

"Agent Fitz," declared the man from behind the desk. "Have a seat."

"Dead." The word fell out of his mouth before he could even think to keep it in.

It caused the senior agent to look up form his paperwork, his face expressionless. "Excuse me?"

"Um, nothing. It's nothing. We were just, you know, told you were dead and all."

Coulson leaned back fully in his leather office chair. "Do I look dead, Agent Fitz?"

"Uh, no, sir. No, you don't."

"Then let's assume for the duration of our little chat that I'm not." He looked around the youngest man in the room to make eye contact with Agent Blake, who was waiting at the door. "I want to talk to Agent Simmons next."

Just when Fitz thought his panic level couldn't reach any higher, he was proven wrong. What had they done? The pair had been sure they'd covered their tracks on the little prank they'd pulled on Benny in Research. Just because you lucked out in making a Chitauri weapon fire didn't make you a genius. And being actual certified geniuses, the scientist and the tech engineer had wanted to make sure Benny understood what it meant to play at their mental level. It'd been a harmless joke: Fitz and Simmons developed a ingestible tablet that turned Benny's skin neon pink for a week and slipped it into his lunch a month ago. Surely something like that didn't rate a discussion with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own Beetlejuice, did it?

_Oh, God, _Fitz thought, _my parents are never going to know I died. No one will ever find our bodies. There are so many things I don't want people to find in my apartment. Please, God, don't let me die right now._

"Anything else?" Blake asked.

"Fresh coffee would be nice," Coulson shot back with a hint of a grin.

"Of course," Blake said in a tight voice before making his exit.

Coulson's eyes turned back on Fitz, and he repeated his request for the young agent to have a seat, which Fitz obeyed. The senior agent then returned his focus to the personnel file laid out on the desk. "Graduated from MIT at age twenty-two with a Master's in mechanical engineering. The school is also where you earned your Bachelor's at the age of twenty in the same field. Says here one of your fellow alumni tried to recruit you to work for him when you were nineteen. Why is it that you turned down Mister Stark's offer to come design weapons for Stark Industries six years ago?"

Fitz's memory flashed back to that fateful week. After submitting a design for one of his courses—a missile navigation system he'd invented himself—he'd received an anonymous email offering a job if he could track down the author of the electronic correspondence. It had taken six days and the hacking of a number of systems before Fitz had backtracked the message to the original sender, who listed his username as a phone number. When he'd called the number, the last thing he expected was for Tony Stark to answer personally.

"My mother would've murdered me if I'd left school without completing my degree," Fitz answered.

Coulson nodded at the answer. "You've been with S.H.I.E.L.D. for two years now, is that correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Working in weapons development."

"Yes, sir."

Coulson grabbed a stack of pictures that was amongst the various objects spread in front of him and passed it over to Fitz. "What do you make of that?"

Fitz began flipping through the series of images. The first showed a two-story building with a large hole eradicating what the timestamp and position of the sun showed to be the northeast corner of the second floor. The second showed a body clutching a rifle. Fitz swallowed the emotional reaction he still had whenever he saw corpses and focused his attention on the design of the weapon. The third image showed an undetonated bomb attached to the shell of the building.

"First picture shows detail of an aerial attack. Without evidence of the specifics of the payload delivery, I can't tell you the method—drone or missile—or how much or what kind of explosives were used in the attack."

"Pretty sure an eight-year-old could've told me that," Coulson quipped.

Fitz raised his eyes and ground his jaw. "I'm a scientist. I need evidence before I feel comfortable dispensing theories."

"I don't have time for you to feel comfortable. Impress me."

The younger man studiously ignored the beads of sweat that were appearing at his hairline. He flipped to the second image. "The majority of this is a modified HK416—an assault rifle introduced about four years ago by, among other governments, Turkish military and law enforcement." He held the picture up closer to his face. "From the looks of things, it wasn't functioning when whoever this was found it, and they had to piece it back together. I see parts from two other rifles."

"You sure they aren't just modifications to enhance the weapon?"

Fitz snorted and pointed to the barrel. "That thing is a joke. It's caused so many issues it was nearly immediately fazed out of production six years ago."

Coulson nodded at him. "And the third image?"

"Whoever their bomb builder was did a crap job of checking the quality of his wires. It didn't go off because that one there," he paused to point out a string of metal covered in green plastic, "is under-grade for the charge it's meant to handle. The whole thing short circuited when it was supposed to explode."

"What's your conclusion based on the evidence?"

"Whoever did this is underfunded. They're fighting with weapons that are at least a few years old, nothing new or shiny. Their supplies were crap, or else you would've lost the first floor of the building, too. This was a last-ditch effort to beat someone back that failed because they were down on firepower."

"Why Turkey?"

"I'm sorry?"

Coulson leaned forward and folded his hands together on the desk. "You mentioned the rifle is used by Turkey, among other governments. Why not mention the other countries?"

Fitz flipped back to the first picture and pointed to the arid and mountainous landscape surrounding the damaged building. "Because this doesn't look like Europe? Also," he paused to switch to the second picture and pointed to a marking on the weapon, "this says Mehmetçik 1. Turkey is the only country who calls the gun by that name." Coulson nodded and held his hand out to take the pictures. "Do I get to know what those are about?" Fitz asked.

"No."

"Okay," he replied, drawing the word out with as much disrespect as he dared—which wasn't much.

"You wouldn't happen to know why a Mister Benjamin Pollock experienced a recent change in skin pigmentation do you?"

Fitz swallowed and felt whatever amount of confidence he'd started building for himself flee. "Um, no, sir."

"You know you're a terrible liar, right?" Coulson asked with a hint of humor shining in his eyes.

"Unfortunately, I do, sir. Yes."

Coulson leaned back once more in his chair and eyed Fitz a moment before speaking again. "How would like to continue your work of designing tech in another division? A team I'm personally heading up."

Fitz suddenly felt lightheaded. "The Avengers?"

"No. I spend enough time corralling one weapons designer for the Initiative; I don't need to double my pain. Since the Avengers are on a need-only basis, I've been tasked with forming a team that will operate more frequently and take down lower-level targets."

"Oh," Fitz answered and tried not sound like all his dreams hadn't been dashed.

"Don't misinterpret my words. The targets in mind can still cause major trouble. I want the best to help contain them, and I think you fit that bill. You, along with Agent Simmons, are to be my personal science division. You specifically will be responsible for designing and building tech for our missions. How does that sound?"

Fitz bit his tongue before the words _Like Heaven_ fell out of his mouth. He loved the challenge of having to build new things from scratch on a tight schedule; it made him a better engineer. And whatever perils he was about to face—and there were bound to be some if the agency was having the team lead by a top-class, literal spook—would be worth it for this opportunity.

"I'm in."


End file.
